The Canon EF-24-70mm f/2.8L II USM will now ship in the middle of September, says Canon USA in a notice today. This is the second shipping delay for the new L-series zoom, which was originally slated for release in June.

Elinchrom has announced that the RQ Li-Ion Battery for the Ranger Quadra portable flash system is now available. Compared to the standard sealed lead acid battery, the new Lithium-based unit is promised to deliver more than double the number of full power pops while also being less than half the weight. It's said to charge faster and provide faster recycle times too.

Sony has announced a new line of XQD memory cards that feature higher read/write speeds than existing XQD offerings. Sony XQD S Series will be capable of read/write speeds of 168MB/s, says the company, as compared to 125MB/s for the H Series, which began shipping earlier this year. Two S Series capacities are planned, 32GB and 64GB, with the latter providing double the maximum capacity of the H Series.

The stock photo agency Alamy has released a white paper reporting on a round table discussion the company recently hosted addressing the current state of stock image licensing. The white paper, called "Image Licensing: Time for a Change?", is available as a free PDF download.

The U.S. National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) is now accepting applications for its 2012 Short Grants program. The program awards six grants of US$3,000 each to fund picture story projects where the bulk of the work can be completed in two weeks or less.

After releasing a Windows version earlier this month, Jarle Aasland has now posted IPTC Preset Editor for Mac. The free utility creates and edits IPTC metadata files that can subsequently be loaded into the Nikon D4. It performs the same task as Nikon's IPTC Preset Manager, but without the need to install Microsoft Silverlight.

Canon has announced that firmware v2.0 for the EOS 7D, a free update slated for release in August, will increase the specified number of RAW frames that can be captured in a burst from 15 to 25, enable audio levels to be adjusted in 64 increments, add support for GPS Receiver GP-E2 and more.

For many years, photographer Robin Loznak's photo credit has been popping up on MSNBC.com's Week in Pictures feature on a surprisingly regular basis. Loznak's knack for making offbeat, "found" nature images and animal photos has endeared him to the site's photo editors and readers alike. It has been an unusual level of consistent exposure for a photographer who has spent most of his 20-year career as a newspaper staff shooter in small towns. We asked Loznak how he gets so many cool nature pictures and what it's like making a go of it as a photographer far from the urban hubs.

Ilford has launched two new Galerie Prestige inkjet papers in the U.S., a Smooth Gloss 310 gsm and a Smooth Pearl 310 gsm. The company is also launching a new paper lineup called Galerie Premium with a quality level just under the top-line Galerie Prestige papers. The first two Galerie Premium papers are a Gloss 270 gsm and a Lustre 270 gsm.

The great majority of photographs captured of U.S. president Barack Obama, by his official photographer Pete Souza, have been taken with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. The same is true of other members of the White House photo team; the all-Canon crew have used mainly that camera, the EOS 5D or the EOS-1Ds Mark III since Obama took office in January 2009. Late last week, Souza signaled that he has recently been giving the EOS 5D Mark III a whirl, when a picture shot with Canon's new 22.12 million image pixel digital SLR showed up in the White House's Flickr photostream.

DxO has updated its raw conversion application, Optics Pro, to version 7.5.1. The update adds support for raw files from the Nikon D800/D800E and D3200, the Sony SLT A35 and A57, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1.

The New York Times has published a short article and a gallery of pictures by sports photographer Steven Sutton who remembers shooting the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in 1972. The gallery photos, all from the Trials, are in black-and-white and shot on Tri-X film with a Nikon F tricked out with a "revolutionary auto winder".